Bill Rasmussen, the visionary founder of ESPN who helped transform sports from a programming category into a round-the-clock television industry, died Tuesday at his home in Florida. He was 93.
Rasmussen died from complications related to Parkinson’s disease, according to ESPN. He revealed in 2019 that he had been diagnosed with the disease five years earlier.
After working as a sportscaster in Massachusetts, Rasmussen joined the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association in 1974. He was fired as the team’s communications director in 1978, just months before he and his son Scott began developing the idea for a 24-hour sports network.
To make it happen, Rasmussen took an enormous financial risk. He maxed out his credit card and used a $9,000 advance to secure satellite capacity. He and Scott, along with Ed Egan, incorporated the company in 1978 and began pitching the idea to investors, cable operators, and professional sports leagues.
On September 7, 1979, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN, went on the air.
The first broadcast featured a 30-minute edition of “SportsCenter,” followed by a college football preview and slow-pitch softball game. About 1.4 million households initially had access to the network.
Rasmussen’s gamble soon began to reshape the sports landscape. ESPN secured a deal with the NCAA to televise college sports and aired 23 games from the 1980 NCAA Basketball Tournament, giving viewers access to far more tournament action than had previously been available nationally.
The network would eventually grow into a global sports media empire, fundamentally changing how Americans consume sports. Rasmussen, however, did not remain at the company for long. He and his son were forced out by Getty Oil in 1980, barely a year after ESPN launched. He later pursued other media ventures, wrote “Sports Junkies Rejoice: The Birth of ESPN,” and became a motivational speaker and entrepreneurship advocate.
Despite his brief tenure, Rasmussen remained closely associated with ESPN’s origins.
“Bill was a remarkable man — a visionary and an innovator who conceived the idea of a network entirely devoted to sports,” ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro wrote in a statement on X. “Quite simply, none of us would be here today if it wasn’t for Bill’s passion and all the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit he put into building ESPN in the late 1970s.”
Longtime ESPN anchor Chris Berman, who joined the network just three weeks after its launch, previously called Rasmussen “the George Washington of ESPN.”
Rasmussen was born in Chicago in 1932, attended DePauw University, served in the U.S. Air Force, and earned a master’s degree in business from Rutgers University. He was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2025.
Rasmussen is survived by his sons Scott and Glenn, daughter Lynn Van Hollebeke, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife of nearly 56 years, Lois, died in 2011.
For a man whose original idea was dismissed by many as impractical, the legacy is difficult to overstate: Rasmussen didn’t merely start a television network; he helped create the modern sports media industry.
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